At some time in the near future, I would like to buy my wife a digital picture frame. I started looking around, and found, to my utter consternation, that a vast majority of the under-$100 picture frames are widescreen. Yes, nearly all of them sport a screen with a resolution of 480x234. How many people actually take pictures with that sort of aspect ratio? I'd venture to say practically none. Nearly every digital camera defaults to taking photographs with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Widescreen LCDs are great for movies, yes, and some of these frames can do that. But for their primary purpose, i.e. displaying photographs, they are singularly unfit.

Let's take that 480x234 panel as an example. In the ideal case, we would have a photograph 1) displayed in its entirety (no cropping), 2) fill the whole screen, and 3) maintain its aspect ratio. With these devices, however, you get to choose two.

I did some measurements and tests on my 460x234 frame.It actually wants 460x360 pictures, because it shrinks them vertically to display, so I have to disproportionately scale all my photos for this frame.

This fixes display for all modes except "original size", which has a different stretch ration! Idiots.

I measured the stretch ration by placing a square in a photo (gimp anyone?) and then measuring it's on-screen proportions.

I have to scale vertically by 74/54 to get the aspect ratio right. (Which isn't 460/